Bone hunter Devlog 1

Introduction

Welcome to the first devlog of our game project, for a course in DAE Howest. Here we will update you every week on our progress and we hope you will follow along with this adventure. 

Working on this game is a team of two coders: Sari and Willem and three artists: Arne, Nathan and Evie. Our goal is to make a fun party game to play with your friends 

Our game takes place in a garden, where you and your friends will be playing as dogs and where you will fight over bones. You will have to dig through the level and try to bring back your precious bone to your doghouse in order to score points. This is not as easy as it seems! Other players will try to steal the bones from you, by barking or grabbing the bone you're holding on, triggering a game of tug of war where you will have to spam a button as quickly as possible! 

To add to the fun of it, additional points will be given out at the end of the game based on a variety of things: such as digging up bones, stealing bones from other players, successful barks and winning at tug of war. This will reward players for different play styles and encourage them to try something new!

To guide you through our process, we will update you on the art style decisions that were made and our initial prototypes as well, by answering research questions we asked ourselves this week. These questions are there to make the best version of our idea, in order to bring you a fun and polished game to play.

Art

Style

Our team of artists decided to go for something colorful and stylized, to keep the spirit of dogs playing in a massive garden. The Art Bible of this game is in the making, but we are aiming for something easy on the eye, with a simple UI and some real time effects to guide the players through the game.

We want to exaggerate the shapes of the dogs we are making. We are aiming for a toon effect with sculpted characters in Zbrush. 

Other assets will be modeled in 3ds max, with a sculpting pass to have coherency in our game. 

For the textures, we decided to use gradient maps in photoshop, to have this flat color feeling to our game. To add an extra layer of effect we’ll try using a toon shader in unity.

Level 

For our dog’s playing field, we are imagining a lush garden with plants and dog toys laying around. You would be able to see the whole level until a player finds a bone, where we would switch to a focused camera.

Coding 

Software

We decided to start our prototyping phase in Unity, where our coding team feels the most comfortable as they have previously created some projects in Unity.

Unity also has a new input system which we were eager to test out.

The system allows us to easily bind inputs to actions. It makes binding to different input controllers easier, which we find very valuable during the prototyping phase.

As for Unreal Engine, We had never really used the UE C++ workflow. However we wanted to get past that. Unreal Engine has some very good features to add character movement and rotation. Once you get it down it makes it very easy to use new inputs and actions. Unreal Engine also has a good implementation of Line tracing and a very accessible manner of debugging this. 

Why did we choose this game out of our various ideas?

We as a team debated the different ideas and unanimously decided on bone hunter seeing as we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to implement and how we envisioned the game to look.

What engine are you planning to use and why?

For now we’re prototyping in unity seeing as how our programmers have more experience in this engine. Our artists are looking forward to everything unity has to offer and gaining experience in this specific engine.

What problems do you expect to encounter in the future weeks of prototyping?

Implementing local multiplayer and having these function properly with the different controllers. Mapping a single button to multiple actions in a clean and structured way. 

What problems did you run into while prototyping? 

When applying the Tug Of War concept in unreal engine, we ran into some problems trying to show a graphic on screen that represents the current state of the Tug Of War standing. Creating the Widget from within our character class gave us some problems with compiling.

What is your plan for the coming week?

Finishing up a playable prototype with all mechanics implemented. Our artists will start making props to achieve a visibly pleasing look. There are still some things that need to happen behind the screens like keeping the artbible up to date and adding the finishing touches to our techdoc.